On love, loyalty, patriotism, and human nature

(The following is a guest post by Adam Levick of CiF Watch. Adam responds to two of my recent posts. I will reply, answering Adam’s questions and furthering the discussion, next week.) ————— There’s much to dissect in Jay’s “Churchill Doctrine“, as well as his follow-up, “Incoherence on Race and Culture.” I’ll stay clear of […]

The Problem with J Street

The problem with J Street is that it doesn’t make sense. It is conceptually self-implosive. This was never really very hard to see. Last year, during the 2009 J Street Conference, Jonathan Chait wrote. The problem, though, was that J Street had loosened the definition of “pro-Israel” to the point where it had virtually no […]

Facing National Wrongs

Over the past several days Jeffrey Goldberg has been blogging about what I like to refer to as recalcitrant Southern boobs – the kind of people who display the Confederate Stars and Bars, who advocate and maintain that flag as any part of a state symbol, or who argue that there was anything honorable in […]

Apologies: Authentic and Inauthentic

When I first posted about Rick Sanchez at the start of the week, I considered closing with some thoughts about the alternative ways Sanchez could handle the inevitable public statement and apology. I chose not to, but knew anyway that the most likely choice would be the carefully worded, inauthentic utterance of someone coping with […]

People Give Themselves Away

They do. They really do. Once they cross a certain psychological border of irrational – but always rationalized – bias in their thinking about a subject, and it thus emerges as a kind of fetish, they give themselves away. They can’t help themselves. Often, the clues are subtle, though hardly hidden, and they are frequently […]